Friday, 3 January 2014

Polar Adventures - part 2

With the weather breaking for the better I was able to get down to the shed and start on the base boards for the Polar Adventures project.

I started with the standard 9mm MDF squares that have become the terrain boards of choice in the shed. These are all 50cm x 50cm square. Sixteen boards cost me c£28 cut from my B&Q (New Malden) - Its best to buy the really big 8ft x 4ft sheets and to get the store to cut them for you.

I did try Champion timber but they wanted £24/sheet plus 50p per cut - so B&Q won hands down.

First up I primed the boards with white emulsion paint.

Once the primer was dry I liberally covered the whole board in PVA glue and then covered the whole board with sand, grit and ballast. This is a messy job !

With one board done I covered a further nine before running out of basing material. This reminds me that I now need to find an alternative stockist to Modelzone now that it has gone belly up. I left all these boards to dry overnight.

This morning the boards got their first coat of paint - again white emulsion (as it cheap). I plan to put on about three coats the top one being acrylic for a stronger bond.

We'd thought about something similar a couple of years ago but in my son's warped imagination it also included evil remote controlled killer penguins and ice sheets that broke up as the game progressed (plunging figures to their doom at the tusks of evil killer remote controlled walruses)... I do worry about him sometimes!!